Short answer: Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but Christianity became a distinct religion because Jesus and his followers reinterpreted Jewish expectations in light of his life, death, and claimed role as Messiah, which led to a movement that explicitly welcomed non-Jews and developed its own beliefs, practices, and identity. Context and breakdown

• Jesus’ Jewish roots
  • Jesus was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, and taught within a Jewish context of Second Temple Judaism [image]. He preached to fellow Jews and his earliest followers were Jews who believed he fulfilled Hebrew scriptures [image].
• How Christianity emerged
  • After Jesus’ death and the belief by his followers that he was raised from the dead and Messiah, a new movement formed around him as divine in the Christian sense. This foundational shift reframed Jesus’ mission as universal, not limited to a single ethnic or national group [image].
• The role of the Gentile question
  • A major early debate in the Christian movement concerned whether non-Jews needed to adopt Jewish Law to join the following of Jesus. The resolution, seen in the council of Jerusalem and subsequent Gentile inclusion, helped Christianity separate from Judaism as a distinct religion while retaining Jesus as its central figure [image].
• Key doctrinal distinctions
  • Christians believe Jesus is the Messiah who fulfills and transcends the Mosaic Covenant, offering salvation through faith in him and his crucifixion. Judaism continues to await the Messiah in traditional practice and does not accept Jesus as divine or as the savior in Christian terms. These theological differences underpin the separate identities of Christianity and Judaism today [image].
• How to think about the question today
  • Ethnically, Jesus was Jewish. Religiously, the movement he sparked evolved into Christianity, a faith that centers on Jesus as the Christ and includes a broader, non-Jewish audience. Many traditions, denominations, and scholars describe this as a development from a Jewish milieu into a global religion, rather than a simple continuation of Judaism with a different name [image].

If you’d like, I can tailor this to a particular tradition (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) or provide a concise timeline of key events that shaped the transition from Jesus’ Jewish context to the emergence of Christianity.